It’s that time of year again. Starting on the first Thursday after
Labour Day,
Toronto
plays host
to the largest public film festival in the
world, the
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Some
people would even rank it as the top film festival in the world, above the
revered
Cannes
festival.
Cannes
isn’t a public festival and has things working against it such as its earlier,
pre-summer timing. Sundance,
Venice and
Berlin may be more
famous, but are smaller and have less influence in the industry.
Toronto does many things
well and keeps trying
to improve even further.
Some have complained that
TIFF has grown too
large or elitist. These complaints take place every year and while some have a
degree of validity, the usual gripes about festival’s size and programming are getting
tired. No matter what they do, some will object. The fact is that the festival has always been
large, but has maintained an excellent balance of artful
Hollywood
movies with small independent, foreign, Canadian, experimental, documentary,
genre films, and other categories. The
Hollywood
movies benefit all the others by drawing attention
to
them.
With a schedule of 339 films (258 features, 81 shorts), the festival is
going
to be an entirely different experience for
everyone. Some people will primarily see galas, whereas others choose
films based on region, filmmaker or subject matter (e.g. romance, period
pieces, gay films, horror, etc.). Some prefer
to
see films that they know do not have distribution and they might never
otherwise get a chance
to see. Others, such as
myself, like
to throw caution
to
the wind and prefer to not know too much about the films ahead of time.
We simply trust the festival’s outstanding programmers; even if a film isn’t
to our taste, it will be interesting and worth watching and
discussing. I would strongly recommend seeing at least a few films that
you might not ordinarily choose, since the best way
to
try something new is with the savvy, sold-out audiences of
TIFF.
Here are some other tips
to make your
TIFF
experience a pleasurable one.
It's taken me some time to digest all of the 48 screenings I saw from the recent edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (41 features, 7 compilations from Wavelengths or Short Cuts Canada). This was a mere fraction of the 339 films shown, 258 of them features. Seeing so many films at once in quick succession doesn't really do justice to each of them. Fortunately, I was able to catch a fair number of them at press screenings before the festival actually began. So the overload wasn't as much as it might otherwise have been.
Running concurrently with the Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) presented a number of silent one-minute films on the display screens in Toronto's TTC subway system. The festival took submissions from around the world in the seven themes of Urban Encounters and Other Stories; Our Environment and Urban Growth;
The Medium is the Message; Urban Ideas and Politics; Urban Journeys; The
City is a Poem; and After Night Falls.
